MobiFlight Community Support

Hi Folks, this is my first post to this forum having only just learned of the existence of MobiFlight... Now I am wondering if I am in the right place?

So this is the story. We are building a fully functional Link Trainer replica for our local aviation museum. It is of course full size with heading, bank and pitches axes operated by husky stepper motors. Full size of course with someone (the 'pilot') sitting in the 'cockpit' with the top closed and experiencing instrument flight with the basic instruments of WWII.

This pilot will be flying MS Flight Simulator in the conventional manner, the MS FS will be networked via wifi with another at the 'instructor' position, I think we can do that?

This instructor PC will "somehow" move the cockpit according to the movement of the virtual model in MS FS. Two wifi links to do this, one to the base of the unit which will move the vertical (heading) axis and another link to the rotating platform to move the pitch and roll steppers.

OK, I trust that is clear.


If I understand correctly MobiFlight software on the PC interacts with MS FS via SimConnect and sends and receives data via serial link to an Arduino? Please confirm or correct me.

In our case with the wifi links we would like to use two ESP32 micros in the place of the Arduino.


I note that MobiFlight can move steppers as in instruments etc, how flexible is this? I ask as in our case we would need direction signal and step pulses to the micro-step drivers we have.

Is there scope for us to customize the Arduino code?

We also need latitude and longitude values to drive an XY plotter as done by the table top 'crab' in the original Link Trainer.

So, what do you think? Is this a practical solution to our needs?

Thanks
John


P.S. I have beginner level Arduino skills, Delphi software skills, C almost nothing (except as for Arduino) and very little else.

Hi @MrJohn,

sounds like an awesome project!!!

I know how the link trainer works. The pilot does control the plane by input through the controls, and a ploter shows the path of travel.
An instructor station can position the plane at some point in the virtual environment, there is software available that does that already (on top of MobiFlight)

I see MobiFlight comes in handy for interfacing the link trainer controls with the flight sim.
The plotter could be driven by stepper motors which MobiFlight supports.

We will also release what we call a "Generic Device" type - this allows you to extend the MobiFlight firmware with your own specific implementations.

i highly recommend you to join our Discord server (link above) and ask for help with your questions there.